Template:Dsh NDA

TRIAGO: There! That! Didst thou see ’t?
The card-sharp’s fumbling misdirect?
That tell-tale grin or worldly wink that
Cracks heav’n apart and for a twinkling
Throws rude light upon perfidious conjury!
Spy the dark-clad stage boy! How he flies —
Yet bolts a trice too late to beat the curtain’s rise.

Enter HERCULIO, eating an apple.

HERCULIO: How now, sweet Triago. What sorrow?
TRIAGO: A browful, sir. In foreign paper, densely ink’d.
HERCULIO: Pray tell. (Aside) I would pray there were a choice
Had my prayers a hope of answer.
TRIAGO: See here, Herculio. ’Tis a slip. Behold the oily wires.
O, Trickery! O, Falsity! Mark the cagey fingers
Cross’d behind thy back!
O, my career! My toil! My dreary occupation!
Has it all been but a prank, Herculio?
This long and wretched shift: just some saucy jape?
HERCULIO: All well-meant, good Triago. Be not sour —
These are not grapes.
TRIAGO: Indeed not sir: rather, scrapes.
And scars and knocks — the job-lot doggedly sustained.
HERCULIO: (Aside) Some more than others. The odd one feigned.
But come, Sir Tig: what unrests you here?
TRIAGO (waving paper): A tract from a brother clerk in America.
HERCULIO: Cripes abroad. Grim tidings?
TRIAGO: Forsooth: it wears the colours of a fight.
A word-scape stain’d with tightly kernèd face
And girded round with fontish weaponry.
HERCULIO (inspecting the document): Verily, convenantry this dark
Speaks of litiginous untrust.
Wherefore such cruel indemnities?
Wherefore so dry a want of fun?
A merchant wrapp’d with better sense
Would just as soon injunct th’orbiting sun.
What is this pact, Triago? Who demands
Such fearsome consequence?
TRIAGO: An entente of secrecy, no more.
HERCULIO: Secrecy? Do my deceitful ears mislead?
Say it again, my friend: secrecy, didst thou say?
TRIAGO: I did, my Lord, I did. A trifling confi. An N.D.A.

—Büchstein, Die Schweizer Heulsuse